February’s global temperature spike is a wake-up call

Global temperatures for February showed a disturbing and unprecedented upward spike. It was 1.35℃ warmer than the average February during the usual baseline period of 1951-1980, according to NASA data.

This is the largest warm anomaly of any month since records began in 1880. It far exceeds the records set in 2014 and again in 2015 (the first year when the 1℃ mark was breached).

February temperatures from 1880 to 2016 from NASA GISS data. Values are deviations from the base period of 1951-1980.Stefan Rahmstorf

El Niño plus climate change

Two things are combining to produce the record warmth: the well-known global warming trend caused by our greenhouse gas emissions, and an El Niño in the tropical Pacific.

The record shows that global surface warming has always been overlaid by natural climate variability. The biggest single cause of this variability is the natural cycle between El Niño and La Niña conditions. The El Niño in 1998 was a record-breaker, but now we have one that looks even bigger by some measures.

The pattern of warmth in February shows typical signatures of both long-term global warming and El Niño. The latter is very evident in the tropics.

Further north, the pattern looks similar to other Februaries since the year 2000: particularly strong warming in the Arctic, Alaska, Canada and the northern Eurasian continent. Another notable feature is a cold blob in the northern Atlantic, which has been attributed to a slowdown in the Gulf Stream.

The February warming spike brought us at least 1.6℃ above pre-industrial global average temperatures. This means that, for the first time, we have passed the 1.5℃ international aspirational goal agreed in December in Paris. We are coming uncomfortably close to 2℃.

Fortunately, this is temporary: the El Niño is beginning to subside.

Emissions still increasing

Unfortunately, we have done little about the underlying warming. If unchecked, this will cause these breaches to happen more and more often, with a greater than 2℃ breach perhaps only a couple of decades away.

The greenhouse gases slowly heating the Earth are still increasing in concentration. The 12-month average surpassed 400 parts per million roughly a year ago – the highest level for at least a million years. The average rose even faster in 2015 than previous years (probably also due to the El Niño, as this tends to bring drought to many parts of the globe, meaning less carbon is stored in plant growth).

A glimmer of hope is that our carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have, for the first time in decades, stopped increasing. This trend has been evident over the past couple of years, mainly due to a decline of coal use in China, which recently announced the closure of around 1,000 coal mines.

Have we underestimated global warming?

Does the “spike” change our understanding of global warming? In thinking about climate change, it is important to take the long view. A predominant La Niña-like situation over recent years did not mean global warming had “stopped” as a few public figures were (and probably still are) claiming.

Likewise, a hot spike due to a major El Niño event – even though it is surprisingly hot – doesn’t mean global warming was underestimated. In the longer run the global warming trend agrees very well with longstanding predictions. But these predictions nevertheless paint a picture of a very warm future if emissions are not brought down soon.

The situation is similar to that of a serious illness like cancer: the patient usually does not get slightly worse each day, but has weeks when the family thinks he may be recovering, followed by terrible days of relapse. The doctors do not change their diagnosis each time this happens, because they know this is all a part of the disease.

Here in Australia we have been breaking heat records in the past few months, including 39 straight days in Sydney above 26℃ (double the previous record). News reports seem to be focusing on the role of El Niño, but El Niño does not explain why oceans to the south of Australia, and in the Arctic, are at record high temperatures.

This is the true climate emergency: it is getting more difficult with each passing year for humanity to prevent temperatures from rising above 2℃. February should remind us how pressing the situation is.

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3 responses

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rabiddoomsayer(08:33:06) :

With the immediately preceding la nadas breaking records it was unavoidable that a real el Nino would be huge. Scary thought, in a little over a decade today’s temperatures will be equaled by the deepest La Nina.

Following the link to the NASA data we find:http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
We suggest use of 12-month (and n×12) running mean temperature to fully remove the annual cycle and improve information content in temperature graphs.

This chart is using only 1 month, a mere 28/29 daily readings each year, so can be predicted to have more variability in it than the recommended data set. And look – more variability! That 2016 is a high anomaly, rather than a low anomaly, is product of this blog, which only reports about highs and never about lows or mediocre results.

The way of displaying the data in the chart is valid, but not the most helpful, since we are all agreed that Climate Change exists, so a trend line through the entire data set would describe climate change, and the anomaly expressed as relative to the trend line would eliminate the climate change variable (which we all agree on) and allow us to concentrate on the other variability. How variable is it, and how long between major peaks?

The El Nino/La Nina effect is the difference in atmospheric pressure between Mauna Loa, Hawaii and Darwin, NT, based on daily readings, and averaged over various time periods, the minimum should be 30 days. Quite why these two places should reflect global weather variability I’m not sure, but NASA thinks they do, so I am prepared to go along with that. The question is, if we can ascribe the largest amount of variability to El Nino, how much variability is still left over? This would be the “non-El Nino weather” component.

I’m guessing that this overwhelms both climate change and El Nino. I will try to do this work and get back to you.

Looking through my 19 years of rainfall records in the wet tropics, this January’s rainfall was a record low, and this February’s was second-lowest, but March so far has been very wet ( 861 mm in 17 days) but still way behind 2011 (1,211 mm). The switch to typical wet season occurred on March 1st, so the calendar monthly averages will be very contrasting. I have my monthly rainfall data marked up with El Nino brackets, and there is no perceivable correlation between rainfall and El Nino here. In Jan-Feb there were more days with hot westerly winds, clearer skies, and higher temperatures, but that switched off with no warning in March.